Yet the roughly subcircular enclosure on a west-facing slope at Rossanean is the kind of place that rewards a careful look, because what appears to be a simple field boundary turns out to be the remnant of an early medieval ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in Ireland for much of the first millennium AD.

The enclosure measures approximately 42 metres east to west and just under 39 metres north to south. Its defining feature is an earth and stone bank that still stands to an internal height of around 0.65 metres and a more pronounced 1.25 metres on the exterior, the difference reflecting how the original builders piled material inward from a surrounding ditch. That ditch, or fosse, survives in a shallow form on the east-northeast side, now just 0.1 metres deep, much of its original depth lost to centuries of silting and agricultural activity. A field drain running northwest to southeast cuts across the northeast sector, truncating the circuit at that point, and the field boundary just outside it may actually incorporate material robbed from the original bank. At the south, there is a possible causeway entrance roughly 1.6 metres wide, the kind of narrow, deliberate gap left in the bank to allow access while still maintaining the enclosure's defensive or symbolic coherence. Inside the northern part of the enclosure, surveyors identified what may be a hut site, a faint trace of the domestic structure that once occupied the interior and gave the whole arrangement its purpose as a farmstead rather than merely a boundary.